


King of Kings

by epistolic



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-29 09:27:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/685402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q and 007, at the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	King of Kings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atavistique (Rivers)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivers/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [诸王之王](https://archiveofourown.org/works/772769) by [baysian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/baysian/pseuds/baysian)



> For Yvonne, who asked for apocalypse!AU! I hope you enjoy this one darling ♥

Q is pumping water from the well in the back yard when he hears it.

It is not even an exact sound. A sense, an instinct, in the back of his mind makes him pause with the half-full bucket in his hand, leaning some of his weight on the handle of the pump. 

The skin over his nape prickles. He sets the bucket down, carefully. There is a rifle leaning close at hand – everything is close at hand nowadays, has to be – he takes it up silently, relearns its familiar weight, feels it complete him as simply as an extension of his own arm. 

This is not who Q used to be; but then, nothing is as it used to be, anymore.

\--

The Great Fire came sometime at the end of the last year. Q was at home – at that point, home was in London. It was late at night and he became aware of a bright flash that startled him from sleep. He spent a long while sitting up in bed, listening hard, hands fisted in the bone-white of his sheets.

There was exhaustion all of a sudden. He sagged; his body seemed to fail him; it was as if his joints were made of rubber. He leaned back against the headboard of the bed and dragged his breath into his chest. 

With a loud shatter, the glass of his window erupted; the shards poured over the floor.

He was dreamy. His mind, normally razor-sharp, operated as if through syrup. His thoughts swam up – they bubbled and frothed and got in the way. He put his hand to his cheek. When he took it away, the movement seemed to him as if it had occurred underwater, and his fingertips were bloody. Was he bleeding? It seemed an academic sort of question: he was only mildly interested. He watched with detachment as the doorway of his room began to collapse. He realised that he was abruptly naked, that all the sheets on the bedding, that his pyjama bottoms, had all mysteriously disappeared.

Later, he was thirsty; he sat down in the street where he inexplicably found himself, tired beyond belief, and begged those passing him for water.

It rained, but the rain coming down from the sky was black.

\--

Q is moving silently around the side of the house when he gets shot. He shouts – it’s a stab of sound in the air – he goes down.

He’s been hit in the leg. He presses his hand to it automatically, half-mashed into the dirt. The sun is in his eyes and he can’t tell who has taken the shot. The rifle is awkward against his hip; he scrambles backward, nails scrabbling, hauling his body towards the safety of the wall.

“Don’t move,” somebody says, quiet.

Q stops. 

His body curls in on itself. His blood is hot against his palm and he can’t quite believe that this is happening. There are still burns across his side, ones that never healed properly; he feels feverish.

A shadow folds over him. “Don’t move.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Q says, squinting up. It’s a man: a man, and a shotgun pointed at Q’s cheek. Q is tired all of a sudden, tired like on the first day when the Fires came. “I’m not moving. As you can damn well see.”

“Let go of the rifle.”

“I can’t. It’s the only thing I’ve got. You take it and I’m dead.”

“You’re dead anyway, if I pull this trigger,” the man says.

Q props himself up on his elbow as best he can. He has a finger wormed into the trigger; the barrel of the shotgun slams into his cheekbone, hard enough for him to see stars. Something wet trickles down his neck. He is aware of the rifle sliding out of his grip, aware of all his muscles going limp. 

He is tired. He lets the darkness take him.

\--

“You were in London,” a voice says, pulling him out of the deep.

Q stirs. There is something warm near his cheek – for a moment he panics, squirms away from the smoke and the fire that spread from building to building like an avalanche.

Someone catches him, pins his limbs to his body. “Jesus. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Get _off_ – ”

“I’ve only just managed to bandage your leg, I’m bloody well not going to let you undo my good work.”

Q blinks at how close the voice is; somewhere above him, mumbled almost into his hair. The world comes into focus. He is in the guest room of the house, the one on the first floor. He is lying on the mustard-coloured carpet which he knows is the only part of the room hidden from view of the windows. Something has been wound around his thigh – a torn-up shirt.

To his right, a small wood fire crackles on the hearth.

“You shouldn’t,” Q says. He stops to swallow around his dry mouth. “The smoke, it gets out. People will see.”

The arms around him let go. “Nothing to be done about it. I had to sterilise the knife I used to dig the bullet out, or else your leg would’ve come off in a week or so. It’s not a pleasant way to go.”

“You could’ve just killed me.”

The man says nothing. This is the first chance Q has had of getting a good look at him: hunched over, orange firelight flickering over his face. He’s tall despite his current posture, his face worn and lined, his eyelashes glinting a dull gold. In profile he has a pressed, taut mouth.

Q tries to sit up. “What did you do with my rifle?”

“Don’t move. Your burns are bad enough without you helping them along.”

“I need my – ”

“You don’t need it right now. The only thing in this room to shoot at would be me, and I’m hardly going to give it to you for that purpose. Save it for when you actually need it.”

Q sinks back down, stares up at the guest room ceiling.

“You were in London.”

“Yes. Obviously.”

“Did you know a wo– ” The man stops, then hunches down further and feeds a twig into the fire. “Never mind. How did you get yourself out?”

“Motorbike.”

“Petrol?”

“I siphoned it out of abandoned cars,” Q says. He doesn’t know why he’s telling all this to a complete stranger – but he supposes that there comes a point when it all stops mattering, and he reached that point a week ago. “I used to do it as a student, I was skint. Guess it comes in handy.”

“Right.”

“Where are you from?”

The man reaches across the hearth for the poker – an easy, absent-minded movement, like it’s something that he’s done a million times before.

“It doesn’t matter,” the man says, and they leave it at that.

\--

Q had a name, once. He had a neat signature with an indulgent flourish at the end that always made him feel childish. He had a home, a family of sorts, a job.

“What do I call you?” he asks the man, because as temporary as this is it has to at least be functional.

“007.”

“You don’t have a name?”

007 is peering out of the window, drawing the curtain shut. “I have a number.”

And Q has a letter. It makes sense in a way. He supposes that at times like this, men retreat into simplicity: into the absolute barest form of all things. Or else the immensity of where they are, of how they have suddenly found themselves, of their situation, overwhelms them.

Better not to think too hard. Better not to know your neighbour.

\--

On the second day, Q peels back the makeshift dressing on his leg and nearly bites through his lip.

007 frowns down at it. Outside, an ashy sort of snow is falling – Q knows what it is, knows that nobody should be anywhere near it and breathing it in. The skin around his bullet-wound is hot, red.

“You stitched it,” Q says, surprised.

“Of course I did.” 007 puts a hand on Q’s knee, turns the thigh towards him. “It’s still oozing. There’s pus coming up underneath the stitches. And it’s swollen.”

“What on earth did you stitch it up with?”

“Sewing needle,” 007 says. “Can’t leave it open. By the way, your burns – you should be changing the dressings daily, or else it’s going to get infected. All that skin laid open like that, you’re going to end up with some sort of sepsis.”

“You sound like you know what you’re doing,” Q says, raising a brow.

“That’s because I do. Those stitches will have to come out. I’ll have to clean it again.”

“None of this would have happened if you hadn’t have shot me,” Q says.

An expression goes through 007’s face. It’s an incommunicative face normally, closed-off and gated and locked away from the air; but Q sees a flash of something, lightning-fast.

“I’m sorry,” Q says finally. “I’m not sure why I said that.”

“It’s the truth,” 007 says. His blue eyes look dull in the pale afternoon light. “Wait here. I’m going to find a pair of scissors.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Q says, for the sake of saying _something_.

\--

In London, Q worked for a government organisation.

He was good at what he did. In fact, he was the best. He was the youngest and the brightest; his mind was crystalline, expert, capable of things that were almost unmentionable. With his fingertips alone he could undo the world. They were frightened of him, and they kept him on a tight leash. It didn’t matter. He’d been doing what he loved to do.

“God,” Q says now, gingerly navigating himself into the kitchen. “What I wouldn’t give for a computer.”

007 shoots him a sharp look. “There isn’t any power.”

“Yes, I know. What are you doing?”

“Sooner or later,” 007 says, looking down at the two strips of bacon he’s frying up in a pan, “we’re going to run out of gas. We’ll have to start cooking on a fire.”

“Where did you get the bacon from?”

“The pantry.”

“I didn’t realise there was a pantry,” Q says, and leans against the counter.

007 is the type of man Q might have once despised. His frame is thick with calculated muscle; his hands are broad, callused, not the kind you imagine flitting across a keyboard. There is a brute force in 007 that Q would have once found barbaric.

The fat hisses hungrily in the pan. 

“You know your way around here fairly well,” Q says. “Have you been here before?”

007 doesn’t answer.

There is a throbbing pain deep inside Q’s leg. He can feel how his dressings are soaked. He knows that his forehead is hot, that his body is slowly but surely giving way. 

In London, he had stood at the end of a street and watched a dead woman catch on fire. She’d been lying prostrate in the road: she’d looked as if she was melting, a grey fluid leaking down her hands to pool at her fingertips, and the fire had spread from there, eating its way steadily up her arms and into her hair.

“If we run out of gas and we have to cook on a fire,” Q says, and finds that he cannot continue.

007 looks at him. An understanding passes between them, a sudden flicker of connection.

“Of course,” 007 says.

\--

When the intruders come, Q is asleep on the second floor of the house.

He wakes to the slam of windows opening; 007 is there, a rifle Q has never seen before slung casually across one shoulder. 

007 tosses a second rifle onto the bed. “Here. Do you know how to shoot?”

“What are we shooting at?”

Down the long, winding path to the house, a car is approaching. It’s battered up and one side of it is too low, so that as it scrapes down the gravel path, sparks fly up in its wake. It has obviously been driven through a lot: one side is seared jet-black with char. It might have even come from London.

007 puts a bullet through the front tyre and the car stutters to a stop.

It’s a stark, certain aim; delivered without a blink of the eye.

The car door flings open and a figure stumbles out. From this distance, Q can just make out the thin, starved build; the head of tangled hair; the elongated flash of metal that is a gun being inexpertly raised.

The next bullet 007 sends right through the car’s bonnet. 

The fuel tank ignites, a firestorm erupting upward and out like a flower. Its bright petals flare and snatch. From their vantage point, they watch as the woman disappears into it without even a scream.

\--

“You learned to shoot somewhere,” Q says.

007 is peeling a rabbit on the bedroom carpet. The blood is no big issue – there are more bedrooms in this house than they will ever get the time or inclination to use.

“My father taught me,” 007 says.

“No. Not like that. It’s not – you don’t shoot like you’re hunting deer, or pheasants, or whatever.” Q pauses; his tongue feels parched. He’s almost light-headed. “You shoot to kill. You shoot like you’ve killed people before. It’s different.”

“You’re wrong. My father used to take me hunting.”

“But you didn’t learn this from him.”

There’s that powdery grey ash in the fur of the rabbit’s paws. Q watches as 007 patiently dusts it off. 

“I tried to point a gun at you too,” Q says after a while. “You didn’t kill _me_ on the spot.”

“No. But nearly.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” 007 says. He wipes his hand off on the carpet. “Next time, we should keep the blood. We can boil it. It’ll be something, which at this point is better than nothing.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You made the decision, didn’t you?”

“Everybody makes decisions,” 007 says. “I made a decision not to kill you. You made a decision to trust me. Somebody in this world made a decision to do this to us, to burn London to the ground. There isn’t any point in wondering why. We just have to make the best of it.”

“Did you make the decision to leave your wife behind?”

007 goes still. “What?”

“Your wife. Someone. Whoever it is that you almost asked me about, when you found out I’d come here from London. She’s still there, isn’t she? Who is she?”

“I’m not married,” 007 says, stiffly, a side-step.

“But you love her.”

The knife flashes once in the dim light. The rabbit’s intestines, a florid purple, spill out onto the floor. 

“She’s dead,” 007 says. He’s closed-off again, eyes shuttered and blank. “Whether I love her or not – it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

\--

The fever takes hold of Q. It glitters behind his eyes; he feels it in his blood, the heat, the wall of flame that he escaped from, now eating him up from the inside out.

“I’m going to clean it again,” 007 tells him. 

Q’s lips are cracked. He is thirsty. He is aware, just barely, of what 007 is doing: but more so than that, he is aware of the minutiae of everything around him. He is aware of the neat line of a table’s edge, aware of each speck of dust on the mottled rug. The way a light hits a lampshade from the dawn outside. The colour of the air – a pure, distilled grey.

He is aware, very distantly, that he is dying.

“No, don’t clean it,” Q finds himself saying. He can feel his pulse in his ears. “Don’t bother.”

“If only there were some – fucking – antibiotics – ”

“It hurts when you take the stitches out, don’t take them out, _please_ – ”

“I have to. I have to clean it. You’ve got an infection.”

“I don’t care.”

And the truth of it is, he doesn’t. Every fibre of his being is attuned to pain. Q fists a hand into the front of 007’s shirt, the same shirt he was wearing when he put a bullet into Q’s thigh, pulls him down.

“I’m sorry,” Q says. “I’m sorry about your lover.”

The kiss is scraping, feverish, raw. The effort of it sends black spots across Q’s vision. 

He lets go of 007’s shirt, falls back breathing hard onto the carpet.

“I’m sorry,” 007 says. His voice sounds strange, like he’s somehow taken in a lungful of smoke; Q supposes that it’s his fault, really, the fire inside him, the black parts of it fighting to get out of him and into another body.

“I’m sorry,” 007 says, and leaves the stitches in.

\--

Q can’t remember getting burned. Knows only that he looked down at some point and saw with surprise that there were great white sections of him that were scorched out by the fire, torn, eaten, bloody.

He does remember the thirst. He remembers how swollen his tongue felt in his mouth. He remembers the sting in his eyes of having to squint through the smoke, the column of pure heat that chased down every street; the buildings levelled. For a long while he wandered about in the search for water, for any thing that might cure him. All about him other men and women were doing the same. 

When the rain came, it was a heavy, black rain that pummelled.

He remembers turning his face to the sky – opening his mouth, trying to catch the droplets on his tongue.

He remembers it feeling like a first communion: waiting, waiting, for a benediction from God that never came.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in one huge rush because all of a sudden I just _needed_ to write apocalypse!fic. Features of this apocalypse borrows heavily on first-hand accounts of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let's hope that such a terrible thing never happens again ♥
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥
> 
> **I have also started up a Skyfall recs Twitter with[kyrilu](http://ao3.org/users/kyrilu) at [Skyfall_Recs](https://twitter.com/#!/skyfall_recs), if that's something you're interested in then feel free to check it out!**


End file.
